Record of the Week

If you are of the certain age that I am you will remember when all the Radio One DJ's had a record of the week. They still might have but how would we know.

Anyway, for the first time in a few decades, I've got a record of the week. There are some things that you know are going to be great without having heard or seen them. For example, I knew The Simpsons was going to be brilliant before I ever saw an episode.

And I knew this record was going to be good when I read the title in yesterday's Times in a review of the forthcoming album. I keep saying pop music's finished but it won't quite lie down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wREjT7DlI7M

Welcome to Milton Keens

Colleen Hawkins takes another look at Milton in the light of the BBC Poetry Season. You even get one of her trademark witty titles which you don't get from me.

----

I’m not certain what prompted me to watch the Armando Iannucci programme on Milton, given that he’s never been a poet whose work – with one or two notable exceptions – has ever meant a great deal to me. At university the passionate advocacy of Milton by one, somewhat odd tutor fell on stony ground and failed completely to persuade me that reading Paradise Lost could possibly be anything other than a tedious, but necessary chore. Consequentially I dutifully plodded my way through it, produced four thousand uninspired words on some dull aspect of the wretched thing and rarely, if ever, took my copy of The Complete English Poems of John Milton down from the shelf again. A few years ago when I was attempting to thin down my book collection in preparation for a move down to Devon, culling it was one of the easiest decisions I have ever had to make. I agonised slightly longer over The Selected Poems of W.H. Davies and I’m hardly “full of care” for his stuff either.

Obviously Paradise Lost is a great work of English Literature, but that’s also true of a considerable number of canonical works which routinely bore English Literature students rigid. I can’t help but remember Philip Larkin expressing similar sentiments to mine in a copy of The Faerie Queen that he’d borrowed from the Bodleian Library as an undergraduate:

First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queen is the dullest thing out. Blast it.

(Larkin, by the way, is dead on with these tedium rankings: The Faerie Queen truly is the the dullest thing out). Even Dr Johnson, a bona fide fan of Paradise Lost, stated “None ever wished it longer than it is”, which makes you wonder what those who dislike it must be saying about it. In actual fact though Johnson was wrong about this because Armando Iannucci clearly does wish that Paradise Lost were longer than it is and (to paraphrase some words of Satan’s from the poem) would make a heaven of what would be a hell for most of us. Iannucci seemingly boundless passion for all things Milton remains slightly baffling to a non-believer like myself, yet also potently infectious.

Maybe it simply doesn’t matter what motivated me to watch this programme since it clearly succeeded in its stated aims and left me resolved me to give the old guy’s magnum opus another go. I also find myself hoping that others who viewed the programme will be moved to do likewise. Since I already know that I like Lycidas and even genuinely love some of the sonnets – especially sonnet 23 (“Methought I saw my late espoused saint”) which you can (and should) read if you follow the link below – this means that there’s already some solid foundations to build on. Being realistic it seems unlikely that I will ever grow to love Paradise Lost, but I am hopeful that more pleasure will be garnered on my second, willing trip through Milton’s wacky “re-imagining” of The Book of Genesis. Grateful thanks are therefore due to Mr Iannucci for his spirited attempt to justify the ways of John to me.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/sonnets/sonnet_23/index.shtml

Tom Paulin - The Secret Life of Poems

Tom Paulin, The Secret Life of Poems (Faber)

Tom Paulin goes too far, by his own admission. These 'close readings' go beyond what is strictly necessary, finding things that are evoked possibly only for Tom Paulin, that would evade almost all other readers, so secret are the lives of the poems that he reveals.

His method suggests that from Wyatt to Jamie McKendrick, not much has changed in the way poetry functions through linguistic effects, which is reassuring, but not all poems have been lucky enough to have been so scrutinized to by Paulin's attentive ear. In the last word of Larkin's Cut Grass, for example, (and it is 'pace') Paulin hears a 'faraway cricket match' which is all a part of his ongoing insistence that Larkin's poems are all about the loss of the British empire. The cricket match is there for Paulin but whether it was there for Larkin, or even if it needs to have been, is one of the tantalising questions in this engrossing set of readings.

Although claiming to 'jettison all explication of the text' in favour of concentrating on 'sound, cadence, metre, rhyme, form', several of the accounts make a quantum leap from these purely verbal and linguistic features into political and cultural issues with Paulin inevitably and repeatedly sympathizing with proletarian and Catholic victims of a ruling class, Protestant hegemony.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' That Life is a Heraclitean Fire is imbued with even more than one might have realized its glorious broad sweep might have included while Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 (with the 'bare, ruined choirs') 'reflects the dilemma of the Catholic artist in a harshly Protestant state'. So while Paulin sometimes extends poems to greater effect, he sometimes reduces them. And he certainly reduces Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts (a Favourite Poem elsewhere on this website) by noting its 'glossy, metroploitan, intellectually inflected language'. I suspect that where I find a philosophical acceptance and benign resignation to the inevitable, Paulin's political commitment sees complacency, a lack of commitment and possibly even a turncoat.

But Paulin is never less than a stimulating guide and one can only admire what secrets he finds in many of these poems. If you listen hard enough, the echoes can seem to go on forever.

Signed Poetry Books - Tom Paulin

This was another bargain on e-Bay. It's surprising how often the author's signature on a book makes it worth less than the cover price but there can't be many people collecting C20th poets.

The curly line under the signature didn't look quite right to me when I got this one. Surely it's a little bit decorous for one as serious and phlegmatic as Tom Paulin.

So when I got a chance to speak to him I asked him. And he vouched for the provenance of this signature. 'Yes,' he said,'I do that.'

BBC Poetry Season

Just when it seemed universally accepted that there is absolutely 'nothing on telly' anymore, the BBC have gone and proved that they can still do it if they try.

The Poetry Season that is still in progress, and tonight offers a programme on Paradise Lost as an alternative to the grinding inevitability of the still ongoing football season in which the gorgeous Wayne Rooney will face up to the falling-over Barcelona in a titanic clash of unspeakable cliche, has been a treasure.

At first it did look as if they had filled a weekend on BBC4 by dusting off whatever they could find in the archives. And it was good to see much of it again, as well as Ian Hislop's history of the laureateship. The sight of Auden shuffling down the stairs to be interviewed by Parkinson was quite moving, even before one had to wonder what Seamus Heaney would make of Jonathan Ross' inane waffling if a similar show was attempted now.

But it has been much better than just that. Owen Sheers' (pictured) series on a Poet's Britain has been exemplary, putting an interesting selection of poems in geographical and biographical context in a way that is sensible, evocative and unpretentious. Sheers himself is a real find as a presenter, being so presentable and the antithesis of the scruffy weirdo that many might expect as the stereotypical poet.

His account of Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge was well-judged and delivered a great summary of what happened to Wordsworth; Sylvia Plath's Wuthering Heights showed off the genius of the poet rather than dwelling too much on the dark life; George Mackay Brown goes onto one's reading list after seeing the beautiful, remote background to his writing and Matthew Arnold is an old favourite of mine who needs looking at again. Dover Beach is a somewhat forgotten classic, lying dormant in all those anthologies but still immensely powerful.

Perhaps it is simply because I'm overly grateful for these programmes but I was almost tempted to write that Simon Schama's programme on John Donne was just about the best thing I've ever seen on television. You normally have to buy books to find out about this sort of thing. It was more or less John Carey and Simon Schama, helped out with readings by Fiona Shaw, outlining the essential bits of John Stubbs' biography of Donne but they enthused about and explained some of Donne's best poems as well, which all seemed fine to me as I had voted for him in the Nation's Favourite Poet poll only a day or two before. One thing I did find out was that I had wasted my time scrutinizing the portrait of Donne in the National Portrait Gallery for the motto 'better dead than changed' inscribed on it in old Spanish. It's not on that painting at all, but an entirely different one.

I don't particularly care if it is 'good for poetry' or not as I've been in it for the long haul for a few decades now but I'm sure these programmes have been more than enough to improve poetry's image in the public's perception while the election to Professor of Poetry at Oxford has been reduced to a shameful political fracas.

Griff Rhys Jones did his bonhomie-based best to include as many aspects of the poetry world as he could, even if it did include a 'slam', although he was presumably preaching to the converted as to 'why poetry matters'. Nobody who thought it doesn't was likely to be watching.

We still have Milton to go, plus Simon Armitage on Gawain, and a life of T.S. Eliot. Get there if you can and see the land we once were proud to own. Not just poetry, which is a wonderful land in itself when presented properly, but also television.

It still has it uses, it doesn't all have to be pointless shiny glamour. It won't always be the Poetry Season and it didn't ought to be either but one might think that the BBC could stick one poetry programme hidden away late at night on BBC4 on whichever day of the week they please.

The point is, although it is unlikely that 10 million viewers will ever agree, that John Donne, Carol Ann Duffy and George Mackay Brown- to name just those representatives of our poetry world- are far more interesting, talented and glamorous than anyone that Simon Cowell or Alan Sugar are going to unearth and manipulate. But I'd prefer it remained our secret. I'm just grateful that the licence to watch broadcast material on receiving equipment paid for something worth watching this year. Otherwise it would just have been the snooker, Midsomer Murders and a few Proms, like it normally is.

My Favourite Poem - Angie Fisher

Angie Fisher has chosen Madrid 14 September 1973 by Spike Milligan.

I walked along some forgotten shore.
Coming the other way
a smiling boy.
It was me.
‘Who are you old man?’ he said
I dare not tell him all I could say was
‘Go back!’

------

To be fair, this is a considerably longer poem than some of her own.

My Favourite Poem - Selina Goodwin

Selina Goodwin has picked Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, 'because for me it evokes childhood memories and it has a supernatural quality which is both scary, sinister and of a fairytale nature.'

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/crossetti/gobmarket.html

St. Michael's Church, Oxford

You need to be really careful in pursuit of Shakespeare. Never assume anything, don't take anything for granted.

The font in St. Michael's Church, in the centre of Oxford, is 'advertised' on the strength of the fact that Shakespeare stood by it 'as godparent to the child of a Cornmarket innkeeper.' That's fine, Jane Davenant lived just across the road and was mother to William Davenant, and some of us think that godparent was the very least that Shakespeare was to him. So, one goes and dutifully stands next to the font so that one has stood where Shakespeare stood.

But then you read the notice that says that the font wasn't always in this part of the church but was moved to make room for more pews and that it would have been near the main entrance on the west side of the church. So you have to decide where that might have been. In order to get it right, I asked the nice, helpful man in the souvenir shop. Luckily, he knows about the church as well as the price of his calendars and church-themed memorabilia.

'Ah,' he says, 'it is a bit misleading.' In fact, when Shakespeare stood next to the font, it wasn't even in this church but was moved from an entirely different one. So it is best to check.

I Don't Want to Talk About It

I Don’t Want to Talk About It

Maybe it’s better this way. And, if less
is more, there will be plenty.
In fact, we’ll overflow
as if with all the juices of a bowl
of summer fruit; as if all the rivers
of England brimmed so full that High Streets
in market towns became thoroughfares for fish;
as if the empty universe seemed so full
of stars; as if a heart so full of blood
would only burst for love;
as if civilisations could cease to rise
and fall or languages go silent overnight
while silence becomes just one more
of those impossible things you do
and as if I’ll never never
never never write another
poem about you.

Signed Poetry Books - Ted Hughes

My signed Wolfwatching was an e-Bay bargain. It was a 'return to form' when first published, or at least a return to publishing animal poems rather than the myths and legends of his sequences. I have sometimes thought that the success of Crow led Ted down a less successful career path.

Still required by my collection, which runs to 20-or so poets now, are Auden, Eliot and Larkin. Although Auden is likely to be gettable, the others are quite expensive now. I do regret being a little too circumspect when some Larkin items became available on the Larkin Society's forum some years ago. It doesn't pay to be too polite sometimes and a crucial opportunity was missed.

Michael Donaghy - The Shape of the Dance

Michael Donaghy, The Shape of the Dance (Picador)

Michael Donaghy was the darling of the poetry scene and his reputation still growing when he died at the age of 50 in 2004. One is tempted to think of Marlowe, Keats and Edward Thomas as similar early departures who were likely to go on to achieve much more.

Whereas in olden days a poet's handbook would include definitions of trochee, spondee, metaphor and synecdoche, nowadays it is more likely to be a book like this, a collection of articles and essays describing what poetry is, some indication from a master of how one might write it better and some outline and argument about the various poetry factions so that one might decide whose side one is on.

Donaghy's is thus a useful such guide because he is an intelligent and funny mentor as well as being on the right side. In fact, because these essays were collected from magazines rather than written to be published together, they do become just slightly repetitive of Donaghy's preferences. Also, the idea of 'teaching' poetry composition is an absurdity so, thankfully, Donaghy's advice is kept to fairly general observations so that not all his readers end up writing surrogate Donaghy poems. Clive James, rarely one to let one paragraph suffice where he can run to three, is also a wise and entertaining host and so we don't mind that he covers much of the material that is to come in the introduction.

The best advice Donaghy has to offer poets is, ' whenever you want to say something, stop. Don't. Show it instead. The sad fact is that nobody wants to know what you think'. It is only the old maxim of 'show, don't tell' but it is very much how Donaghy works, we watch his poems reveal themselves rather than sit to hear them announce anything. Similarly, the set of interviews at the end of the book often have him explaining his deft, playful, largely personality-free poetics.

But most important are the essays in which he firmly takes sides with the formal, traditional, amateur poetry against the avant-garde, vers libre, professional academic sphere of poetry. The 'well over 250' creative writing programmes in American Universities produce hundreds of qualified 'professional poets' every year who all produce their slim volumes and go on to teach on creative writing programmes. Donaghy's preference is for the New Formalists, like Timothy Steele, who have returned to established, natural poetic practice now that the avant-garde, Modernist rebels like Ginsberg, Creeley and Olson are the free verse establishment, their lack of forms and discipline having not given them the freedom they sought.

Dana Gioia and Richard Wilbur are other admired Formalists who, presumably given the title of this book, give shape to their dance. In fact even Stravinsky is brought in on the side of form and free verse wasn't even a modernist invention anyway.

Donaghy debunks the sophistry of Imagism, the revolutionary claims of Beats and Language Poets so entertainingly that there is a laugh on most pages and one comes away with one's feelings confirmed. You were right all along but you just weren't confident enough to say so.

Well you can now because you can wave this excellent little book of essays at anybody who won't have it.

My Favourite Poem - Gill Rimmer

Rather charmingly, Gill Rimmer has chosen The Cathedrals of Liverpool which is one of the poems that means I could, if I cared to, call myself a 'prize-winning' poet. But she's in it, too. In fact it was her idea, really.

Pictured here is the 'vault of air that broods upon its sinfulness'.

However, before we run through those immortal lines once more, she also gives an honourable mention to Dorothy Parker, and specifically the lines,

I wish I could drink like a lady,
I can take one or two at the most,
Three and I'm under the table,
Four and I'm under the host!

--------

The Cathedrals of Liverpool

That New Year’s Day eventually
the drizzle changed to rain and back
and just in time we came across
Scott’s protestant cathedral
-a vault of air that broods upon
its sinfulness, the height of bricks
too distant for the camera flash
to properly illuminate
which picked out only you.
So tiny in the universe,
you’d hardly think it mattered what
we did or said or thought about
between that monumental stack
of deep foreboding and the climb
up concrete steps to find ourselves
doing a lap round the next one,
taking another photograph.
Nevertheless you did suggest
that this religion might be best,
more flamboyant and glamorous,
that dares more gladly to express
and trusts in all its artfulness,
confesses out the bleak and drab
and lets late afternoon light in
through torn, dramatic shapes of blue.

My Favourite Poem - John Sears

John Sears first chose The Point, the Turning by Gregory Warren Wilson. It's in his collection Jeopardy, published by Enitharmon, but unfortunately nowhere on the internet at the moment.

So he kindly went on to pick a poem that we could all share, and also provided this commentary on it, for which I thank him very much indeed. I'm always grateful for any help I can get with Ezra Pound.

Thomas Ernest Hulme (1883-1917)

The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

(from Ian Lancashire’s resource at http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1082.html)


Hulme’s poem, first published in January 1909, was one of The Complete Poetical Works of T E Hulme appended to Ezra Pound’s Ripostes (1915), which is where I first read it when I was a teenager, and it made much more sense to me then than Pound’s poetry did.

It’s a precursor of the Imagist style Pound will promote, a meticulously crafted poem that embeds in ‘small epiphanies’ and by implication an entire narrative on which the reader can speculate. It shifts from alliterative, Middle English patterning (all those labio-dental ‘fs’ in the italicized introduction and the opening line, returning in ‘fold’ and comfort’ at the end), through deliberate Keatsian archaisms (‘poesy’) and inverted word-order to facilitate rhyme, to an appeal in the last three lines that resonates harder when one knows that Hulme died at Neiuport in September 1917, after living what he described in a letter as ‘the most miserable existence you can conceive of’ in the trenches of the First World War.

The poem operates and achieves its effects with what seems to be a restricted sound palette, ‘cold’, ‘gold’, ‘old’ and ‘fold’ insisting throughout, three ‘Is’ asserting subjectivity, ‘small’ echoing ‘fallen’, ‘’found’ repeated in ‘round’. For all its imagistic force, other senses predominate: the conflicting tactility of the ‘hard pavement’ remembered and the ‘star-eaten blanket’ desired, and, at the centre, ‘warmth’, suggesting both heat and emotion.

It’s stayed with me for 25 years. Patrick McGuinness’s excellent edition of Hulme’s Selected Writings (Carcanet 1998) provides the essays and lectures, notes, poems and fragments needed to contextualize this remarkable little poem.

John Sears is the author of Reading George Szirtes (Bloodaxe, 2008)
http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/titlepage.asp?isbn=1852248149

Shakespeare's Twins and their Parentage

This is an outline of an essay in preparation on Shakespeare biography, the premise being that Hamnet Sadler was the real father of Hamnet and Judith, the twins born to Anne in 1585. The original idea was by Tim Curtis and Julia Taylor and Tim invited me to contribute, which I have been glad to do.

In Alan Bennet’s The History Boys, history is seen as ‘subjunctive’, concerned with ‘what might have been’. Shakespeare biography is similarly subjunctive, dependent on large amounts of supposition from a small amount of solid evidence.
Some of the creative work of biographers and other suppositions have been allowed to become ‘ersatz facts’, like the birthday being on 23rd April, in line with St. George’s Day and the date of Shakespeare’s death, but this is only a possibility, being based on a christening date of 26th. There are other claimed ‘sightings’ of Shakespeare at family events and a court case but sometimes these are based on assumptions that have not been sufficiently verified. Thus Shakespeare is famously someone who died on his birthday without necessarily being born on it.

While Shakespeare must be assumed to be in Stratford in August 1582 to help conceive his daughter Susanna who is born in May 1583, there can’t be so much certainty that he was there in May 1584 to help conceive the twins Hamnet and Judith, born to Anne in Jan 1585. While it is widely assumed, even by biographers as scrupulous as Schoenbaum, that Shakespeare was the father of the twins and that they were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler who were close friends, this has been allowed to stand apparently unchallenged as one of the things we know whereas there is nothing to establish it as a fact.
The often suggested ‘sighting’ of Shakespeare back in Stratford for the funeral of Hamnet, the much beloved son, in August 1596 is less credible if one doubts the parentage as well as doubting the possibility that Shakespeare’s whereabouts could be traced on tour with his company and that he could get to Stratford in time for the funeral.

It is quite possible that Shakespeare wasn’t at the conception, birth or funeral of Hamnet because the twins might have been fathered by someone else and if Hamnet Sadler was responsible for them, then their names could have been a lasting reminder to Sadler from Shakespeare that these children were his responsibility.

Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford is sometimes guessed at on the basis of Greene’s Groatsworth of Witte (1592) in which he attacks a writer thought to be Shakespeare and mentions that he has been in London for seven years. If Greene is exactly right then Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford in 1585 looks a bit like a reaction to the birth of twins he knew were not his, he has apparent justification to leave his wife, two year old daughter and newly born twins in high dudgeon and go to London in search of a career in the theatre. It is equally possible that Greene didn’t know quite as much and that the first biographers, like Aubrey, who reported an early departure from Stratford were right all along and that Shakespeare had left well before May 1584 and thus was absolutely certain that his wife’s new children weren’t his.
It has been thought by many biographers that William and Anne might not have enjoyed a happy marriage and anecdotal evidence offers plenty of extra-marital possibilities. While very little is known about Anne in Stratford, commentators from James Joyce, or actually Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, to Rene Weis in a recent book suggest that Anne could have had relations with other men, one candidate being Shakespeare’s brother.
There are considerably more stories attaching to Shakespeare, including a Dark Lady, the Earl of Southampton or other ‘fair youth’, Jane Davenant, mother of William Davenant, and a theatrical story in which William the Conqueror comes before Richard III.

Shakespeare’s will, although a difficult document in many ways, clearly favours Susanna over Judith. And although Judith might not have died in time to be buried alongside the other family members in Holy Trinity Church, she is notable by her absence alongside Anne, Susanna, John Hall and Nash.
The evidence of the names suggesting the Sadlers were godparents isn’t quite so convincing if one wonders why the Shakespeares named their first daughter Susanna and not Judith since they are unlikely to have known that their next children would conveniently be boy and girl twins.

The title of the play Hamlet, the name of Sadler and the name of the sickly boy is a three-way coincidence that can be simplified down to an extant story that became the Ur-Hamlet in the late 1580’s having the same name as Sadler. The significance of it to Shakespeare need not be that he finishes his masterpiece five years after the death of his son, having in the mean time written As You Like It and some of his cheeriest work, but that it is a play about a young man with the wrong father.

There is a coherent biography that becomes apparent when re-drawing the material in the light of Sadler’s possible paternity of the twins. Shakespeare has either left Stratford before they are conceived or does so soon after their birth at the latest; the marriage isn’t happy and conjugal relations could have ceased between the two at a very early stage sometime after Susanna was conceived; although it is possible to see the great writer as a good man doing the right thing by marrying Anne in the first place, his worth as a writer is that he is human and not a saint- he follows his own instincts in going to London at the earliest opportunity; Anne (and Anne has been known to posterity as Anne Hathaway) and the children are never brought to London but Shakespeare builds up his estate in Stratford; his business is in London but he is never permanently settled there; after a long and successful career he spends more time at home, reconciled with Sadler (if in fact they ever fell out), and making provision for his family. However Susanna is much favoured in the will, being his own blood, while Judith’s unpromising marriage to Thomas Quiney makes him put caveats in the will to safeguard the bequest. Shakespeare has kept the marriage and family together for appearances sake but it was little more than that from the very beginning.

Peter Doherty Grace/Wastelands

Peter Doherty, Grace/Wastelands (EMI)

It took quite some time for the penny to drop with me, I'd be the very first to admit. Having once turned down point blank an opportunity to see The Libertines at Southsea's Wedgewood Rooms, I proceeded to offer someone else the opinion that Pete Doherty was a 'waste of skin' and then, when The Observer gave away a free Libertines disc, I didn't play it for sixth months until someone told me it was brilliant.

They were right, it was. But it was maybe partly the fact that I'd also been told he was a 'poet' that had put me off. That and the way the media indulged a drug addiction that looked much more pathetic than glamorous. However, it's me that says he's a poet now. I don't compare him with Byron, though, I compare him with Milton. I specifically compare the way that Time for Heroes starts like the way that Paradise Lost starts. 'Did you see the stylish....' sounds to me like five stressed syllables at the beginning where 'Of man's first disobedience and the fruit...' has seven, perhaps. Don't quote me on that but it is one way of checking if something is poetry or not.

So, having admired the pretty duetting with Carl Barat on Can't Stand You Now and then Don't Look Back into the Sun, I tried my best with Babyshambles but it was only the insouciant rambling drawl of Lost Art of Murder that was memorable. And here we are again, having accepted that the lad is a genuine talent, wondering if he's ever going to deliver again properly.

Certainly Lady Don't Fall Backwards is a poignant little effort, and I wish I knew why Last of the English Roses seemed so much more than its constituent parts. He certainly wears his hat at a jaunty, knowing angle and after all this time I somehow can't help liking him. At least some of his success is down to the fact that he knows exactly what he's doing, he has his reference points but the attitude that sometimes comes out of the songs- that he can't quite be bothered to do it properly- is perhaps both his strength and his weakness. When he pulls it off it is a neat trick to seem so undercooked but cute. On the other hand, when other songs are less convincing, one might wish he'd do a proper job. I'm afraid this album is not the long-awaited return of the prodigal son.

Signed Poetry Books - Simon Armitage

I do have a signed copy of All Points North by Simon but it's not so much a signed poetry book as a book signed by its poet author.

So he kindly did a very similar scribble across his name on the title page of this book here.

During his reading, he read an extract from Gig, a composite story of various bad poetry reading experiences which ends with finding one of his own books in a box outside a second hand shop, marked up at 10p. He opens it to find it is a signed copy, and below the signature he has added 'To Mum and Dad'.

Signed Poetry Books - Ruth Padel

Charmingly, Ruth asks who to dedicate the book to. Less graciously, I say, 'O, don't worry about that. Just sign it. You can go next to Tom Paulin in my collection of signed poetry books.'

It's an innate thing you're born with. You've either got it or you haven't.

My Favourite Poem- Pam Chadwick

Pam Chadwick has picked this unforgettable masterpiece, The End by A.A. Milne.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/txt/1097.txt

And why not.

My Favourite Poem - Phil Green

In an unlikely coincidence that I certainly didn't see coming, my dad has chosen the same poet as me.

I'm guessing that since my father isn't known to be the most avid of poetry fans, his choice has something to do with the poem having steam trains in it but, you never know. Next time I'm visiting, if I find a copy of the Letter to Lord Byron left open on an armchair then I'll know that all these years we have been missing out on a shared interest.

Phil Green's choice of favourite poem is Night Mail by W.H. Auden.

http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/auden.html

Thank you very much to all who have contributed to this feature so far. And further contributions will be welcome.

Swindon Literature Festival

Reporting live from Swindon.

I'd done well, I thought, was well ahead of schedule, to have finished the Times crossword by the time the train got to Warminster. 13 Down, Artist outlining second capital city, a fine thing to hang (8,3), begins with M and N, answer at the bottom. So I had to look through the rest of the paper for some more entertainment.

As it was the obituaries provided an account of James Kirkup's colourful life which is worth looking up, as well as news of Derek Walcott's withdrawal from the Oxford Professor of Poetry election, which is on Saturday. The slightly dubious circumstances of this late surrender cast a shadow over what small topic of conversation one might make with Ruth as she signs a book for my collection. One could hardly ask if it was friends of hers that had brought to light again the allegations against Walcott at this most inconvenient juncture.

Swindon Arts Centre is a pleasant little venue within walking distance of my sister's house and so a trip up for the evening on which two poets are booked to do their separate shows is becoming a new fixture in my calendar. I have thought previously of Simon Armitage as a sort of yardstick among contemporary poets. Honourable, fine and user-friendly without being a spectacular favourite. His best stuff is good and any poet better than him is one that I would usually buy at least some of their books but those falling below the Armitage standard are in danger of being regarded as ordinary.
His performance here changed that perception quite radically, though. He is genuinely funny in his deadpan, Northern way, much more 'intelligent' than I thought and the poems are more consistently deeper than the hip cleverness that one might think of in the younger Simon. He is a practised, almost elegant performer with a nice stock of stories and chat. The only downside is the baggage that comes with his latest book, Gig, the theme of which is how poets are really frustrated rock stars. Well, we are much better than that, thank you very much, and by the time we are in our mid-40's we should have got over it. But Armitage is a good lad, reading some time-honoured older pieces, like You May Turn Over and Begin, an extract from his translation of Gawain and newer poems, including a fine one that conflates the characters of a giant panda and Ringo Starr to considerable effect. He exceeded my expectations, is much better than a yardstick poet and so now I need a new yardstick. I might try to do that job myself for a while.

During the Q&A, it looked for a moment if the audience were tongue-tied or unable to think of a suitable question and one doesn't want it to get embarrassing so I considerately saved the day by asking if he thought it was about time we had a bloke for poet laureate. Luckily, several of the audience realized the droll intent of the question and Simon wisely played a straight bat to it and just said, 'no.'

Ruth Padel's presentation was a guided tour of highlights from her new book about her great, great grandfather, Darwin, a Life in Poems. Interesting enough as biography, it was tempting at times to wonder if the poetry didn't suffer for having been written to order in such a way and at such length. Without the low-key chat in between poems that Armitage had benefitted from, it came across in comparison as rather serious and scholarly. Ruth Padel is not really a forbidding figure but her reading here was unwittingly more in the form of an illustrated lecture.

I have long been fairly keen on the idea that there is no such thing as 'women's poetry', that the idea is a construct of women poets but that in fact nouns, verbs and adjectives function in exactly the same way whether assembled by ladies or gentlemen. But I wonder. Darwin will no doubt be reviewed here in due course when I've done more than flick through it. But there might be a case for resurrecting some old gender stereotypes to suggest in some vague way that some women write more intuitive, emotionally descriptive, intangible poetry while men, in Virginia Woolf's phrase, wield a more 'arid scimitar'. I hope it isn't so and any differentiation is likely to be so vague and circumstantial as to be meaningless but who can tell.

The Swindon Literature Festival is a worthy event, not quite as famous as Ledbury or Hay-on-Wye, but convenient for me and I can now start looking forward to seeing which poets they book for next May. It's been well worth it so far.

Crossword answer- Mosquito Net.

My Favourite Poem - Dave Moxham

Dave Moxham has chosen Corfe Castle by Alun Lewis, of which he says 'it is a short and straightforward piece both pastoral and romantic with that perfect sense of place that I find attractive in any form of writing.'

I regret to say that so far neither the internet or my own collection of books has been able to provide a copy of the poem.

Kazuo Ishiguro - Nocturnes

Kazuo Ishiguro is in many ways at the opposite end of the range of contemporary fiction writers to Salman Rushdie. Where Rushdie is flashy and extravagant, Ishiguro is quiet and subtle and whereas Rushdie's prose draws attention to itself, Ishiguro's presents no such barrier between the reader and the story beyond the 'reliability' of the narrator.
These five 'stories of music and nightfall' are inevitably comparable to movements in a suite, sometimes relying on the musical references to add an emotional charge to the writing but also varying the pace and style as the book progresses. They all deal with relationships at crucial moments, at breaking points or in search of resolution.
In Crooner, the narrator is a guitarist working in Venice who meets an ageing singer who had been a favourite of his mother's. He is invited to accompany the singer to serenade the singer's wife from a gondola below her window. He misunderstands that the motive is not to win her over and retrieve the marriage but to mark the end of the relationship which he is sacrificing in the interests of making a comeback.
Come Rain or Come Shine and Nocturne develop into unlikely farces from ordinary beginnings while Malvern Hills has apparently more sinister undercurrents and Cellists ends the set with the theme of unrealised potential still in the balance. Ishiguro's friendly, conversational narrators and references to jazz, pop and classical music suggest a kinship with Murakami but his surrealism is more domestic, like a situation comedy, and his insight into relationships is more subtly expressed. In fact the quiet melancholy has more in common with the unfulfilled relationship between the staff in service in The Remains of the Day.
The stories are masterpieces of subtle control and gain power from their understatement. They gain from being read together but can also each stand on their own. It is clear that less can certainly be more and that such craftsmanship can be ultimately more satisfying than controversy, pyrotechnics and flamboyance.

My Favourite Poem - David Green

I originally intended that this feature would be once a month, or someting like that, but it seems to have got off to such a good start that we might as well have our own little interweb festival right here and right now. So, please, anybody else who feels like contributing, let me know.

There is a crafty way of nominating more than one poem by mentioning one or two that were unlucky not to be one's choice and so podium places, or each way payouts, go to Gunn's Tamer and Hawk or one of Larkin's, like At Grass or Church Going. But I'm not going to desert Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts at this crucial moment.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~creswell/auden.html

In reverse order of things that poems probably need to do, it says something I like but, more importantly, it says it in an exceptional way. I can see how Auden has built his casual, conversational tone into a disciplined form but I've never even bothered to analyse the rhyme scheme because in this there's simply no need to. It is full of brilliant observation and phrasing. It obviously contrasts the extraordinary with the very ordinary. It accepts the inevitable while admiring flawed attempts to do the impossible.

And, for anyone who doesn't know the poem or the painting, the leg of the disappearing Icarus is just in front of the boat.

It doesn't seem to have been decided yet who was the greatest poet of the twentieth century in English. When I was considerably younger, it was orthodox to think it was Eliot but the Modernist vogue has receded a bit since then. There is likely to be a big traditional vote for Hardy. It won't ever be Thom Gunn on a wide, popular sweep of opinion whereas Larkin and Betjeman will have their claims. But Auden, with his facility for great lines and beautiful love poems, could turn out to be the right answer.

My Favourite Poem - Leif Knauff

Well, I certainly wasn't expecting the first three poems chosen in this feature to be in three different languages. Or, for that matter, from three very different centuries. But that's pluralism for you, or diversity, or some other such thing that is to be celebrated.
Leif Knauff picks Stages by Hermann Hesse. Or Stufen, as its author called it.

http://moveablefeast.typepad.com/a_moveable_feast/2007/06/stufen_stages_b.html

My Favourite Poem - Colleen Hawkins

Colleen Hawkins nominates A Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php

Both Sylvia Plath's Morning Song and Philip Larkin's Broadcast were strong contenders for the crown, but - to borrow a term from Mr Green's beloved horseracing - Dr John Donne wins it "on the nod" with A Valediction Forbidding Mourning. This poem never fails to move me and yet one would hardly expect a poem drawing so heavily on terminology and concepts taken from the seemingly rational and unemotional spheres of astronomy, metallurgy and mathematics to be quite so affecting. "Like gold to aery thinness beat" is possibly my all-time favourite line in a poem or song, but then again I also really rate "I was so upset that I cried all the way to the chip shop", so what do I know?

My Favourite Poem - Daniel Parsons

Friends, poets and readers of the website are invited to take part in this new feature in which you are simply asked to nominate your favourite poem. If you feel like saying a few words about your choice then please do but it isn't compulsory. You can e-mail via the address on the profile.

I am grateful to Daniel Parsons for starting us off with an appropriately early selection, The Iliad by Homer.

http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.html

Daniel remarks that he noticed a taste for violence in poetry in his choice, having also considered Ted Hughes and Daddy by Sylvia Plath.

It is Homer that is pictured here, not Daniel.

Signed Poetry Books- Carol Ann Duffy

While she's in the news, it's a good time for Carol Ann Duffy to continue this occasional series.

I took a handful of books to the Philip Larkin Society Conference in Hull in 1997 in the hope of getting them signed. Ms. Duffy was one of the poets engaged to read on the last night. I followed her towards the bar afterwards and said, 'Excuse me, miss' to gain her attention but I'm not sure my jokey intent was taken as such. She can seem a bit fearsome even though I'm sure she's great.

Signed Poetry Books- Touch by Thom Gunn

Perhaps my favourite in my collection of signed poetry books is the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn at Cambridge in 1979. It was Weds 14 November and I had taken the train from Lancaster, changing at Leeds, to stay with a friend in Downing College.

I don't remember very much of the reading now except that he read Bally Power Play, the poem about pinball that was later published in The Passages of Joy and that when getting this book signed afterwards I failed to make the most of the opportunity to talk to my big hero. He said that the cover of Touch was his favourite among his books. There was nobody else waiting for his attention and I should have said they were my favourite of his poems, too, but I was 20 years old and a bit overawed and I just thanked him and shuffled away.